“Ah, Ted,” Rosmerta remarked as soon as he’d worked his way to the counter of the Leaky Cauldron. “There’s someone waiting for you.”
Ted Tonks started. He hadn’t asked anyone to, and Andromeda had stayed behind to help a friend who desperately needed help on their potions NEWTs. The reminder that it was the last trip before Christmas hadn’t changed her mind. “What?”
“Right over there, by the window,” Rosmerta told him, gesturing.
Ted looked over, half-hoping Meda had decided to come after all, but he didn’t see her amid the crowd. He did, however, see a tall man with shoulder-length black hair watching snow fall out the window, one with the angular features that reminded him of Sirius and Bellatrix. “Oh, no,” he muttered, remembering why Meda had wanted to break the relationship off in September. This must be Cygnus Black.
For a moment he considered slipping out of the Three Broomsticks as quietly as he could and hiding in Zonko’s. Here he might be spotted, as a young man sitting alone, but in the joke shop he’d be lost among a riot of other Gryffindor scarfs.
Are you a Gryffindor or not, Tonks? part of him rebelled. Go on and face the consequences. It’s not like he can use the Unforgivables in public.
“Thanks, Rosmerta,” he mumbled and, without ordering anything, he pushed through the crowd of people trying to get to the counter to see what this man wanted. As he pushed his way past a pair of Slytherin boys, he wondered if he was really taking the path of least resistance or just making things harder on himself to delay the meeting.
Still, he finally got to the window and, deciding that he’d never be heard over the crowd, considering the squeak his voice would probably become, tapped him tentatively on the shoulder. “Sir?”
The man turned around, a vague smile on his face. “Yes?”
“Rosmerta told me you were waiting for me?”
“Ah.” He looked thoughtfully at Ted, and he got the uncomfortable feeling he was being searched by those piercing gray, Black family eyes. Even Narcissa had them, and it was her searching look this man’s was most like, not Meda’s, which usually carried the message “Please tell me you’re kidding” or at least something he could fathom. “Theodore Tonks, then, I presume?”
Ted nodded.
“Good. From the sound of Meda’s last few letters, it’s about time someone had this conversation with you, after all, and Sirius, while suitable in most respects, is far too young.”
“Sir?” Ted asked, confused. Cygnus had to know that Sirius was very unlikely to curse Ted for dating his cousin. The two were in the same House, and thus far he and Sirius had only spoken to each other on a handful of occasions, mostly concerning the noise level of the common room and whether or not Lucius Malfoy was going to kill one of them.
The man grinned. “Introductions are in order, I guess. I’m not Andromeda’s father. I’m her Uncle Alphard.”
“Oh.” Andromeda had always told him she liked Alphard, at least, although that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to tell Ted to break it off for her sake. No, what slightly changed his opinion was that he’d seen Alphard’s name on several prominent wizarding literary magazines, and while his stories seemed nonpolitical, he was the only pureblood writer he’d seen whose characters almost never had pureblood surnames. These days, that alone was almost a political statement in favor of tolerance, albeit a subtle one. Alphard Black was no hell raiser, but apparently the family consensus was that Alphard had facilitated Sirius’s development of Gryffindor traits.
As a figure in Andromeda’s home life, Ted had decided he liked Alphard. He just hoped he could hold onto that, now that he was meeting the man in person.
Alphard shook his head and glanced outside again. “I think we need a quieter atmosphere,” he announced. “Here, we’re too liable to be caught. Cissy may be hanging off of Lucius, but should she notice us she’ll be bright enough to put two and two together.”
Ted nodded and followed Alphard as he swept out of the Three Broomsticks and down the street. He stopped again at the Hog’s Head. He spent a few moments staring speculatively at the sign. “If it gets back to Wally that I went for a drink in the Hog’s Head with Andromeda’s boyfriend she’s going to skin me,” he murmured, then shrugged. “Which is still better than what Bellatrix would do if it was as public as the Three Broomsticks.” He pushed the door open and ushered Ted in.
The pub was mostly deserted and in need of a good scrubbing down. Alphard was able to stride unencumbered to the counter, barring the barman’s raised eyebrows. “Hullo, Aberforth.”
Aberforth put the glass he was cleaning down. “What’ll it be, Alphard?”
“Hm? Oh, I’ll take mead and. . . ?” He glanced questioningly over at Ted.
“Butterbeer,” he answered automatically. “What else?”
Alphard shrugged. “Well, you are of age and, anyway, if you haven’t noticed our laws on drinking are a bit more relaxed than their Muggle counterparts. I know I took advantage of them as a teenager.”
“I remember that,” Aberforth announced as he reached under the counter. “I nearly had to call my brother down to get you. Then I swore never to sell Firewhiskey to a fifteen-year-old again.”
“I’m sure my nephew will be quite disappointed.”
Aberforth rolled his eyes as he emerged with a dusty bottle of butterbeer. “If he’s anything like you, I imagine he will be. I’ll get the mead, shall I?”
“Thank you, but. . . .” Alphard pulled something out of his pocket and enlarged it. It proved to be a mug. “I hope your not too insulted.”
“If you must know, my brother does the same thing,” Aberforth muttered.
Alphard looked back at Ted and shrugged. “Cleaning has never been Aberforth’s strong suite. Sometimes I wonder if he doesn’t use his goats instead of a spell. But the atmosphere’s a lot more peaceful than the Three Broomsticks, and well, if you’re feeling overshadowed by family he’s the best person to talk to, because you can’t top him, and unlike the average fourteen-year-old, he’s forgiven his brother for being one of the most well-known names in the wizarding world.”
Ted raised an eyebrow as Aberforth returned with the mead.
“The brother I’d mentioned’s the headmaster,” the barman explained.
Alphard shook his head, conjured another glass, and handed them both to Ted. Then he led him to one of the many empty tables. “If there’s only one Black from my generation who people remember, it’s my sister Walburga,” he explained. “I’ll be telling Regulus about the Hog’s Head when he starts coming down here, especially since Aberforth’s better with kids than he seems. None of the girls really needed to be told, though. After all, as overpowering as Bellatrix can be, she doesn’t want the brand of attention Narcissa craves, and Andromeda was never the type to feel overshadowed.”
Ted looked up, since Alphard seemed to have drawn the conversation back to the reason he seemed to have started it.
“Speaking of Andromeda, how long have the two of you been dating?” Alphard added.
“Erm . . . thirteen months, I think,” Ted answered, although he knew exactly how long it had been since he had finally broken down the wall she’d put up, supposedly for his protection.
“Have you thought at all about . . . after Hogwarts?” Alphard asked tactfully.
Ted blinked.
“I don’t necessarily mean marriage,” Alphard informed him quietly. “Still, within the walls of Hogwarts there’s a certain rationalization Cissy especially can take, that circumstance pushed you together, although it does normally take more than circumstance to push a Gryffindor and a Slytherin together. Things will have to change.”
Ted didn’t like where this was going. “We’ve discussed this, sir. We’ve discussed it a hundred times over, before she even agreed to let me take her to Hogsmeade.”
“Good.”
“It’s not going to come down to the choice you seem to think it’s going to come down to, sir. She’s not going to have to choose between me and her family . . . not until she wants to.”
Alphard absently pulled a pipe out of his pocket, but rather than put tobacco in it, he turned it absently around in his hands. “Meda’s in love. Self-delusion is usually a sure-fire sign.”
“What?”
“Look. . . .” Alphard waved the pipe vaguely and settled for, “Ted. Have you paid any attention whatsoever to the relationship between Andromeda and Narcissa? It’s changing, subtly. Has been for the past thirteen months. She’s putting distance between herself and her sister, and Cissy’s building walls so it won’t hurt so much when the inevitable happens.” He shrugged. “I don’t know that they could go back if you broke it off now. After Hogwarts, when the possibility of marriage comes in, that gap is only going to grow.”
Ted hadn’t really thought about it that way, but now that Alphard mentioned it, he no longer saw Andromeda and Narcissa sitting at the Slytherin table laughing at some secret joke anymore. They were still polite, but it was in the way Narcissa and Sirius were polite, as if a fight was just too much hurt and effort.
“The longer it lasts without commitment, Ted, that bigger that gap is going to grow,” Alphard continued. “And eventually she’s going to realize it, and it’s going to scare her. Then she can either rip it open as far as it can go, or she can stop while they can still hear each other across the divide.”
“Why are you telling this to me instead of her?” Ted asked.
“Because Meda’s a Black. She won’t listen to me if she doesn’t want to,” Alphard replied. “You, on the other hand, she’ll listen to. When things like this happen, hanging in the middle only hurts people. It’s marriage or nothing by now, before she isolates herself more.”
“I thought you said you weren’t necessarily talking about marriage!” Ted exclaimed.
“I said I wasn’t necessarily asking you if you’d thought about marriage,” Alphard corrected him with a shrug, leaning back against his seat. “Now I’m very explicitly asking you think about it.”
Ted bit his lip. He really liked Meda, who managed to be as passionate as one sister and as polite and affectionate as the other without it being a paradox. Most of the time he wouldn’t even hesitate to call it love. But marriage . . . she’d mentioned it, but only in a very offhand way, as something in a vaguely defined future. Alphard was talking about it as if it was imminent. “But. . . .” He stopped. Such protests suddenly sounded too childish.
“The course of true love never did run smooth, did it?” Alphard asked softly. “That’s how you know it’s real. You keep going even when it hurts.”
Ted raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, I know, Shakespeare’s an odd man to reference for a pureblood,” Alphard admitted. “I never did like that play. If the characters had any sense, Romeo and Juliet would have fled to the next city state and they would have lived.”
Ted shook his head, thinking that this must have been the Alphard Meda told him about” literary, prone to tangents, and fairly pragmatic.
Alphard, however, shook his head to clear it and returned to the subject at hand. “I’m only asking you this because I don’t want her to do the same thing I did.”
Ted looked up surprise. “What?”
“I suspect I was rather more thoughtless than Andromeda, when you come right down to it,” Alphard answered. “But there was a Muggle-born girl I started courting in my seventh year. I never married her, although the relationship did last several years. Then I realized that Cygnus was no longer asking me to watch the girls for him while he frantically studied for his NEWTs, that Orion never came out of some scholarly fog to tease me about antagonizing his wife, that Wally and I couldn’t have a conversation without it becoming a political argument. Frankly, that scared me. Family was more important to me than I had realized, and I didn’t want them to disappear entirely. I broke off the relationship, but things had changed permanently. I never got as close to them again as I used to be.”
Ted blinked. He’d seen Alphard’s point, of course, but it had never occurred to him that the man could be speaking from experience. “I’m sorry, sir.”
Alphard shrugged. “We live and learn. I was too much of a coward to take the plunge, but Meda doesn’t have to be. You just have to ask her to make the choice.”
Andromeda was in the library when Ted got back from Hogsmeade, bidding Lucinda good night and putting her books away. When he approached, she looked up at him out of those gray eyes, and he realized either the dancing hippogriffs in his stomach (these were much too fast and solid to be butterflies) or the icy fear making them cold enough to keep moving must have shown on his face. He also realized that Alphard’s searching stare, as if he was trying Legilimency, wasn’t Narcissa’s stare after all. Meda just didn’t use it very often.
“What happened in Hogsmeade, Ted?” she demanded.
“Nothing much. I ran into your uncle Alphard.”
“Oh.” Her shoulders slumped as she visibly relaxed. “From the look on your face I was afraid it was Dad or Bellatrix. What did he say?”
“Quite a bit, actually,” Ted answered, tentatively putting a hand on her shoulder. Meda smiled knowingly. “But what he came to do was tell me that I needed to either break up with you or propose.”
“Oh?” She arched an eyebrow.
“He’s got a point. I am . . . putting too much distance between you and your sisters to keep this up,” Ted admitted. “Well. . . .”
Meda’s other eyebrow joined the one that was already arched.
“I know this isn’t official or anything, and my mother’s going to have a heart attack when I ask her how to pick a ring out over Christmas, but . . . he’s right. We really do need to take the plunge right out of Hogwarts or not at all.”
Andromeda hugged him. “That scares me,” she mumbled into his sweater. “But he wrote me a letter along the same lines. And he is right. And . . . and . . . and I think you’re worth it.”
As Ted hugged her back, the hippogriffs didn’t go away, but at least the fear melted away and the creatures were dancing with joy as well as fear. Meda thought he was worth it. He reminded himself to write Alphard Black a thank you letter for giving him this push at the next opportunity.